On the second day of our trip, we had the opportunity to gain insight on the rose and chocolate industry in Ecuador. These are two of the leading industries in Ecuador and provide an income and passion for indigenous Ecuadorians. The first stop for the second day also took place in Quito at the Casanto Miray roses farm. Casanto Miray is a very successful farm which distributes various types of roses around the world. They distribute to countries in Asia, Europe, South America, and the United States. The rose industry requires immense amounts of work and can even cause their staff to miss off days and holidays. They produce various sized bulbs in their hybrid roses, different stem lengths, and many different rose colors. America’s favorite color is Freedom Red which is a gorgeous dark red. My personal favorite color is Orange Crush, this is a very smooth peach-like orange. Cosanto Miray has been doing very well in sales, but a very interesting fact comes from their profit margin. A bouquet of roses in New York can cost over $40, but Cosanto Miray only makes roughly $.24 per rose due to shipping costs and other factors. After learning about the growing, harvesting, and business side of roses, we headed to their packaging factory. It was a small building located at a family property. At this place we were shown how they dye their special roses such as blue, rainbow, and toffee colors. After this, we then saw how they package them, trim them, cool them, and then prepare them to ship off. A very interesting fact I took away from the packing side was the volume of female workers in the packing and shipping department. The brute of trimmers and packers at Casanto Miray, and many other rose farms in Ecuador have mostly women packers and this gives them an opportunity to provide for their families.
The second stop of the day took place at Bios Chocolate Factory. Here, we learned the importance of secondary flavors. The owner of the factory, who inherited the company through his grandfather who opened the business in Europe, gave us a brief history lesson on chocolate, a taste test, tour of the factory, and we got to make our own chocolate. The importance of secondary flavors is what makes Ecuadorian chocolate so special. The secondary flavor comes from the pod that cocoa pods come from. Pods that are red have no secondary flavors and yellow pods do produce these secondary flavors. The particular secondary flavors, which are the flavors that come to your taste buds after chewing, range from citrus, wood, hazelnut, to many more. These secondary flavors are distinct as to where the pods were grown. Ecuador has many different regions where pods are grown which all produce varying secondary flavors. After this lecture we then sampled chocolate and searched for those nodes of secondary flavors. After this we toured his amazing factory and got an in-depth understanding of all the steps in producing chocolate. This process starts with the key part of fermentation which makes Bios Chocolate so different because it is one of the only factories that ferments their beans 100%. It was amazing to me how the owner checks his beans every thirty minutes during fermentation to ensure they are at the right temperature. Concluding the tour, we then had the honor to mold our own chocolate, indulge in a chocolate mint fondue, try various of the owners’ creations, then sample and wrap our own chocolate. The biggest fact that I was blown away by in the tour was how the company has 38 female workers compared to 6 men, women definitely have better handy work after watching them wrap.
